Guided reading instruction and making words

The purpose of this study was to examine if the use of the Making Words strategy, when implemented during Guided Reading instruction in a first grade classroom, improves the decoding skills of first grade students with and without disabilities. The students were administered the Yopp-Singer Test of Phonemic Segmentation as a pretest and posttest of the study. The Making Words strategy was implemented at the conclusion of each guided reading lesson during a ten week period. There were 16 first grade students included in this study, four of whom had disabilities. The average number of words correctly segmented at the beginning of the study was 14 words and the average number of words correctly segmented at the end of the study was 18 words (an average increase of 38%). Implications of the study reveal that students who are more successful at segmenting sounds are better at decoding unknown words